I'm having a bit of trouble getting xorg 7.4 going under FreeBSD 7. Video chipset is Radeon X800 (R430); card has one DVI out (which I'm using) and one VGA out. I can't seem to get any sort of display. Running 'X' switches to the new VTY, but nothing else happens--just a blank screen with only my LCD backlight. I don't need to use the <ctrl> key to switch to a console VTY, just <alt><Fx>, which struck me as odd and makes me think that something else "important" isn't happening.

My xorg.conf was auto-generated by 'X -configure'. I couldn't find anything relevant by googling. I did find in xorg.conf(5) a reference to Option "Monitor-<input>", so I added

Code:

Option "Monitor-DVI-0" "Monitor0"

and that seemed to help with what was being reported in Xorg.0.log about the DVI not being connected to an output, but I still don't have any practical improvement. I also tried disconnecting DVI (and removing 'Option "Monitor-DVI-0"'), hooking up VGA, and rebooting, but that's the same, just the LCD backlight.

in one or both of the following two places someone has posted
a working xorg.conf that would help
the freebsd questions list
the forums at freebsd.org
Otherwise, the latter has long threads helping with xorg.
Cannot guess as to which would be quicker.
What I have done in the past is google for the specific chipset
"x800 OR R430" xorg.conf "xorg 7.4"
to obtain samples

oh, man, I feel like such a tool. I think everything was working ok--it appears that xorg just changed its look a little. When I run 'X' with no arguments, I expect the irritating black-and-white background. apparently it's just a black background now. the lack of mouse pointer did throw me off, but I noticed that it appeared after I ran 'DISPLAY=:0 xrandr -q' from a console shell. tried xdm, and that worked fine.